255 Books in Review / Comptes rendus

published since 2003, three are the author’s own. Recent literary and
historical work by scholars of polar exploration such as Jen Hill and
Michael F. Robinson is absent, as is the older, but now standard
contribution of Lisa Bloom. Cavell’s narrative frequently touches
upon the relationship of Arctic exploration to other nineteenth-
century cultural narratives, such as romanticism, nationalism and
populism, and science. However, her bibliography includes few recent
scholarly analyses of such phenomena, and her footnotes rarely refer to
those she has consulted. Moreover, some of her assessments contribute
little to her overall argument. With unclear intent, she revives a dead
debate in the Canadian historiography of Arctic exploration (4-7), and
has somewhat dismissive and unnecessary brushes with the work of
major scholars such as Michel Foucault, Edward Said, and Bernard
Smith. This mixed, sometimes clouded, deployment of relevant and
irrelevant literature mutes the force of the book’s arguments.
The main contribution of Tracing the Connected Narrative lies in
its attentiveness to lesser-discussed repositories of nineteenth-century
representations of the Canadian Arctic. It also coincides fruitfully with
a renewed attentiveness to Canada’s imperial history, spearheaded by
Phillip Buckner and others. Scholars interested in one or more of its
themes will find it informative and enjoyable, and may use it with
due critical care.
CHRISTINA ADCOCK
University of Cambridge

Dorothy Harley Eber. Encounters on the Passage: Inuit Meet the

Explorers. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008. xxiv, 240 pp.;
$45.00 ISBN 9780802092755

Dorothy Eber aims to understand the Franklin tragedy on and near

King William Island from the point of view of Inuit oral history.
With Encounters, she, like David Woodman, has made an enduring
contribution to exploration history from the Inuit perspective. Most
scholars study it mainly from a White perspective, which amounts
to an impoverished history, also known as a mystery, because, being
predicated on written sources, it relies on an archive that contains but
a single document written by any of the 129 Britons on the voyage
once HMS Erebus and Terror disappeared into the Arctic archipelago

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in late July 1845. Oral histories are all the more welcome in the case
of this historical event.
In fact, Encounters casts its net widely to provide coverage of
many Arctic voyages and Inuit stories (as well as some remarks by
non-Inuit northerners) about them. All accounts are excerpted from
interviews conducted in several Arctic communities between 1983
and 2006. In her introduction, Eber notes that a disproportionate
number understandably pertain to the expeditions that had the
most interaction with Inuit: William Edward Parry’s second voyage
1821–23 (to Igloolik), John Ross’s second voyage 1829–33 (to the area
of Thom Bay, halfway down the east coast of Boothia Peninsula),
and Roald Amundsen’s successful voyage in a fishing smack through
the northwest passage 1903–6 (including his two winters on King
William Island at what became the village of Gjoa Haven). In terms of
preservation of life, these were not surprisingly also the most successful
expeditions. But the Franklin tragedy, the one that interests Whites
most and Inuit increasingly, forms the book’s core and receives most
attention. The expedition of 1845 had no contact with Inuit before
it started unravelling.
In sum, the stories about this voyage cover familiar ground: Inuit
thought that the deaths cursed the land; even before the deaths
(74), they found that the sailors “‘didn’t seem to be right’” (75); the
appearance of the sailors terrified the Inuit, and so did the fact that
they were carrying “‘bones from legs and arms that appeared to be
sawn off’” (78); ships broke up both west of King William Island
and east of it (88–107), and so forth. Some stories, such as those first
reported by J.B. Tyrrell in 1908, are fully re-rehearsed (104–6), but
a number are new to print or are variants of ones already published.
An example of the latter is the story heard by five searchers between
1858 and 1923 about Inuit boarding an abandoned ship in the Royal
Geographical Islands west of King William Island, encountering in a
cabin the body of a very large man, failing to off-load all the desirable
supplies (e.g. iron) before the ship sank, and being responsible for the
sinking because an ignorant Inuk, trying to shed some light on the
dark lower interior of the ship, drilled a hole in the hull below water
line. The new variant included by Eber suggests that a shaman drilled
the hole and knew exactly what he was doing (133). The innocent
version of this story, repeated last by Knud Rasmussen in Across Arctic
America (1925), was used by poet Gwendolyn MacEwen in her verse
play “Terror and Erebus” (1974). In 1991 and 1995, Margaret Atwood
criticized her friend posthumously when she judged MacEwen’s

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 257 Books in Review / Comptes rendus

account “fairly implausible – Inuit people are not so dumb about

boats.”1 So, oral accounts can evolve both as they are rehearsed and,
once published, as they are interpreted, in this case in Atwood’s
mindset of political correctness.
Eber acknowledges as well that “old stories are sometimes blended
or ‘collapsed,’ as anthropologists say, a process apparently much on the
increase in the last fifteen years,” perhaps because, written down and
no longer “learned almost by rote,” they “are now getting through to
the next generations only in a fragmented state” (xix). Nevertheless,
she regards them as sufficiently reliable to merit rehearsal. She, the
storytellers, and their interpreters have succeeded in stitching together
a composite narrative beginning with the first appearance of English-
speaking qallunaat in the North American North – Martin Frobisher
and his men on Baffin Island in 1576.
But although historians and ethnohistorians may welcome this
volume, it will give bibliographers pause. Eber does not explain
her methodology as a recorder of oral history pertaining to Arctic
explorers or offer an opinion on the validity of one or another story’s
content or point of view, or the reliability of its source. Routinely
if not exclusively, she links excerpts together without comment.
Perhaps when it comes to oral records traditional bibliography
asks the wrong questions – which is the base text and which the
variants? – yet, it behooves scholars to undertake the very difficult
work of deciding on the merits of a text’s identity and contents. Yes,
one must avoid polarizing natives’ and newcomers’ versions, preserved
by rote or on paper. Yes, one must avoid the “three scholarly pitfalls”
that Laura Murray has identified regarding the study of imperial/
colonial sources.2 And, yes, one must stop thinking that we identify
unproblematically with our European forebears (because our cultures
share written communication); as Anne Salmond persuasively argued

1 Gwendolyn MacEwen, “Terror and Erebus: A Verse Play for Radio,” The
Tamarack Review 63 (Oct 1974): 5–22; Margaret Atwood, “Concerning Franklin
and his Gallant Crew,” Books in Canada 20, no. 4 (May 1991): 24; rpt. in Strange
Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995),
26.
2 “First, the assumption that ‘we’ can achieve objective understanding whereas
‘they’ are benighted by prejudice and superstition; second, in contrast, the idea
that ‘their’ superstitions make it impossible for ‘us’ to understand anything; and
third, the impression that ‘they’ are all rather the same – where ‘we’ represents
present-day scholars and ‘they’ colonial sources.” Laura J. Murray, “Colonial
Ethnography and Supernatural Bears,” American Literary History 12 (2000):
218.

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in her work on Dutch explorer Abel Tasman, the links between the
seventeenth-century Dutch cultural baggage with which Tasman
sailed and the twentieth-century cultures of New Zealand or even
Holland are as distended and ultimately precarious as Napoleon’s
supply lines to Russia, if not as different from pre-contact Maori
cultural practices.3 But then what? Surely readers can expect a scholar
to offer a nuanced reading of documents, not be satisfied to compile,
organize, and present them.
Another matter that Eber leaves unpursued is the relation between
an explorer’s own writings and the subsequent narrative published
under his name back in Britain. In providing historical context for
each expedition, she is content to quote from written sources that
were published. Just as oral stories evolve, so did explorers’ accounts as
they grew from handwritten entries in logbooks or diaries to published
commodities that usually reflected the interests of more people than
their author, including their purchasers.
Eber does not disclose much about the extensive interviews that
she conducted, and one infers that no scholar is yet permitted access
to the sources. Interviewees are identified in notes, but Eber does
not identify the whereabouts of tapes and hard-copy or electronic
transcriptions and translations. Her illustrations are excellent, but,
because the notes about them are very spotty, the original of many
would prove tough to track down.
Now that the Canadian government has funded Parks Canada
to search for the drowned wrecks of ships off King William Island,
this book is bound to be caught up in renewed public interest in the
fate of Franklin. While it deserves to be, readers interested in print
culture and bibliography will have to be satisfied with the contents
of the stories. They will not encounter or have the opportunity of
evaluating details of the story of how they made their way into print;
that, regrettably, remains a mystery.
I.S. MACLAREN
University of Alberta

3 Anne Salmond, Two Worlds: First Meetings between Maori and Europeans,
1642–1772 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991).

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